Scheduling is a process of forming a plan under which action may be taken toward a goal. For a service organization such a goal includes a number of business objectives, such as offering convenient appointments to perform services for customers, making quality commitments in regard to these appointments, and reducing costs associated with performing these services. To obtain services, a customer calls a service organization to place a work order for a service. The service organization schedules the work order. Then, the workforce of the service organization performs the service.
In practice, this process of scheduling work orders is nontrivial if the service organization desires to meet multiple business objectives, such as those mentioned above. Also, various constraints, such as break times of the workforce and the need to give priority to certain work orders, further complicates the process of scheduling.
Earlier generations of scheduling systems operate in a batch mode. These systems accept work orders from customers but are not sophisticated enough to immediately assign these work orders to a specific worker of the workforce. They offer appointment windows based on an inaccurate approximation of the capacity of the workforce. The night before the work is to be performed, these systems assign the work orders to the workforce in a large batch process. With these systems, customers are confined to a certain options relating to the service that is to be performed. This limits the ability of a service organization to satisfy the preferences of its customers.
As the expectations of customers have increased over time, scheduling systems that fail to meet these increased expectations may result in customer dissatisfaction and lead to the eventual lack of acceptance of the service organization in the marketplace. Thus, what is needed are systems and methods for enhancing the scheduling process that allows a set of constraints to be satisfied and a number of business objectives to be met while fulfilling customers' increased expectations.